Friday, 24 October 2014

Hi! Soo I wrote this paper in the Spring for Oxford and wanted to share it. As someone who lives outside the borders of both whiteness and 'able bodied ideals' discussions on the intersections of colonialism and ableism are incredibly important to me, so thinking about this stuff in relation to one of my favourite Comme collections was kind of everything!

Arabelle (whose own lumps and bumps tribute is talked about in this paper, and who wrote about Comme only yesterday for Rookie, which reminded me to actually upload this essay!) helped me also and said nice things about it so that really meant a lot!!

But um yay, I hope u like it!! I always get so, so anxious before uploading my work??? But hopefully it is okay!!!

☁ ☁ ☁

“We didn't lie to you, folks. We told you
we had living, breathing, monstrosities. You'll laugh at them, shudder at them,
and yet, but for the accident of birth, you might be even as they are. They did
not ask to be brought into the world, but into the world they came. And now, if
you'll just step this way, you are about to witness the most amazing, the most
astounding, living monstrosity of all time. [A woman screams.] Friends, she was once a beautiful woman. A
royal prince shot himself for love of her. She was known as the peacock of the
air...”

-‘Freaks’, directed by Tod
Browning (1932)

It is said that God created man in
his own image. Yet, when comparing one’s own reflection to the angelic figures
of runway catwalks and movie posters, you can’t help but draw the conclusion
that God is either very cruel or rather ugly. This is the dead space between
‘should look like’ and ‘actually looks like’, which can be identified in the
profound sense
of loss that undercuts the act of getting dressed.It is the gap between the item we want (the designer
dress) and the item we can afford (the high street knock off), the physical
body (how we are perceived) and the dream body (how we wish we were perceived),
the clothes on the hanger and the clothes on the ‘ordinary’ person, the clothes
on the ‘ordinary’ person and the clothes on the model.

A particularly powerful case study for understanding these
tensions between ideal self and actual self, beauty and ‘deformity’, liberating
high school movie make over versus horror film mutilative revenge, can be found
in Comme des Garcons Spring/Summer 1997 collection, ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress
Meets Body’. One of the most commercially unsuccessful offerings from the
label, it is colloquially known as the ‘Lumps and Bumps’ range for the tumour-like
padded growths and built in hunch backs that warp the ‘ideal’ forms of the
young, white, female models on the runway (1).[1]
In distorting the traditional boundaries of the female form, by blurring the
safe space of the untouchable, eternal, beauty of runway collections, questions
are raised of the pre-existing ideals of the ‘beautiful’ body and the ‘beautiful’
dress within high fashion.[2]
The viewer wonders: where does the dress end and the body begin?[3]
Is that arched silhouette the handiwork of Rei Kawakubo (who is the head of
Comme des Garcons) or does her model have scoliosis? (3) Is that girl on the
runway ‘one of them’ or “one of us”?

We can understand such questions by locating the
collection within the existing history of ‘deformity’, disability and the
grotesque, in the visual culture of post-World War II Japan. This can be
achieved through studying the ero-guro
(erotic grotesque) genre and the avant-garde dance movement AnkokuButoh (dance of darkness)
(2).[4]
To focus this comparison, I have selected one particular case study, the 1969
film ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’. Directed by Teruo Ishii (1925-2005), a
prolific Japanese film director, who created a number of ero-guro films, it was adapted from a collection of stories by the
Japanese horror writer, Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) an avid fan of ‘freak show’
culture, whose work, from the 1930s onwards, serves as an earlier example of
the ero-guro genre in literature.[5]

‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ is a unique, and therefore
exciting, movie to study, because it exists as both a powerful example of ero-guro, and a showcase for the Ankoku
Butoh dance form, due to Ishii’s casting of Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986), the dancer and
choreographer who founded this movement, and his dance troupe, to star in the
film. Whilst,
no research has been previously undertaken on the links between ‘Horrors of
Malformed Men’ and this particular Comme collection, it is relevant to note
that the choreographer, Trajal Harrell, has been investigating the connections
between the work of Comme des Garcons and the Butoh genre for a number of
years. This research serves as a complement to his own, Butoh inspired, dance work.
In an interview with Time Out New York, Trajal explains:

“Even though they’re
different generations, clearly in the ’70s, there’s some overlap. I would like
to ask Rei Kawakubo that question. But I haven’t found anyone who’s said,
“Let’s look at the connections between Butoh and Comme des Garçons and Hijikata
and Rei Kawakubo.””[6]

It is interesting that a prolific artist, such as Trajal,
focuses particularly on Hijikata, the Butoh performer I have selected for this
paper, suggesting that ‘the Tales of Malformed Men’-S/S 1997 comparison is not
only unique (after all anything can be unique if one tries hard enough) but
important in understanding the invisible threads that connect seemingly
separate movements in the post-World War II world of the Japanese avant-garde.[7]

It should be stressed, however, that this is not an
attempt to either homogenize, or essentialize, these works as essentially
‘Japanese’, a model of writing which has its own uniquely grotesque history in
Western journalism, with its portraits of warped Orientalism being every bit as
lurid, as disconnected from any lived reality, as an Edogawa Ranpo story. This
is the work of publications such as Women’s
Wear Daily whose bizarre prose includes quotes such as: “Ah, the delicately
winning ways of Rei Kawakubo, the samurai geisha of fashion.”[8]
This is an outlook so obsessed with “the glib generalization about the impact of post-Hiroshima
deprivations” that red lipstick was mistaken for open wounds, designers’ own
explanations of collections were ignored, with Western writers favoring their
own idea of a ‘tragic Orient’ producing “post atom bomb fashion” and “Hiroshima
chic” collections.[9]
This resulted in Japanese fashion designers being known,
not by name, but by nationality.[10]Print mistakes, as a result of
cultural ignorance were also commonplace, with names of Japanese designers
often being misspelt in Vogue, and the 1989 trade publication ‘Fashion Guide’
listing Comme Des Garcons as a French company, whilst referring to Rei Kawakubo
as ‘Hai Kawakube’.[11]

Butoh underwent a
similar fate, with reductive readings of the work, as a simple product of
post-war trauma, abounding.[12] This was despite the fact
that Hijikata himself did not see the dance style as “exclusively Japanese” arguing
that it
“could as well emerge from Northern England as from Northern Japan” a point
illustrated by his cited influences of the post WWI Surrealists of Western
Europe and transgressive French authors such as Jean Genet.[13](A parallel to Rei Kawakubo choosing the
French lilt of a Francoise Hardy song over her own supposedly ‘Japanese’ name
when christening her label.)[14]
The cultural critic, Mark Holborn, emphasizes this issue of Western
misunderstanding, arguing that, in exposing Butoh to a Western audience, “the
change of context, like all translation…may have distorted the original
meaning. It confirmed the accessibility of Butoh as spectacle, even if the
translation dampened the subversive fire.”[15]

The phrase “distorted” is key, particularly in
relation to the question of ‘mistranslating’ Japanese culture. Perhaps, the
Orientalist school of fashion journalism, with its butchered Japanese, its misreading
of collections, and references to “samurai geishas” is a model of ‘deforming’
and distorting the Comme des Garcons collection in and of itself. It is a ‘freak’,
created not by birth, but by the white superiority complex of colonialism. And
whilst, the notion of the ‘freak show’ is an important part of this essay, this
particular ‘freak’ is one I do not wish to take over the paper.

Of course, this history should not ‘scare’ writers
away from writing critically about Comme des Garcons. Neither should they
eschew the critical application of context (either in terms of history or
ethnic identity) in their analysis under the guise of ‘not seeing race’. Such a
shallow, ahistorical, model fits neatly into a white, liberal narrative, whitewashing
the work of people of colour and erasing their history, under the pretension
that everyone is ‘identical’.[16]Instead, I would argue, that by understanding
the failings of previous cultural critics in the West, writing on these
collections may become stronger, more nuanced, and the historical context, of
both the reality of 20th century Japan, and the Western writers’ ‘idea’ of 20th
century Japan, may be used to further our understanding of the work of Comme
des Garcons, rather than limit it.

This is relevant when considering the work of the
artists themselves. For whilst Rei Kawakubo (b.1942) insists she had a
comfortable upbringing, free from tragedy and poverty, Hijikata’s Butoh
movement was, in contrast, directly influenced by the war, particularly thefirebombing
of Japan, and the family he lost during this period, whose absent bodies were
absorbed into his dance.[17]
And though, he refused an essentialist Orientalist idea of ‘Japaneseness’, the
Butoh movement was still shaped around his surroundings, both in his upbringing
in Northern Japan, and the all-consuming blackness of its night skies, and the “constantly
mutating body” of post-war Tokyo, which he made his home from his twenties
onwards.[18]
In this sense, if we are to produce a critical reading of Comme des Garcons, through
contextualizing its links with movements such as butoh and ero-guro, before applying this understanding to the question of
disability and ‘deformity’, it is not Japan’s history or cultural heritage, we
should reject, but rather the Western Orientalist construction of Japanese
identity and Japanese history.

With this existing model of Comme as sign for the
‘warped’, ‘broken’ ‘Orient’, and the positioning of Japanese designers as “inadequate
imitates of Western fashion and racial threat” in place, it is possible to interpret
this collection as a revenge, of sorts.[19]
A parallel could be drawn to the finale of Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’ (1932) where
the so called ‘freaks’ enact revenge on the beautiful Cleopatra (who has
Othered them, mocked them, and even planned to murder one of their own-her
supposedly ‘beloved’ husband) by turning her into a quacking ‘human duck’ (4.),
tarred, feathered, legless, with webbed feet in place of hands, one eye gouged
and her tongue cut out. Cleopatra, whose very name denotes physical perfection,
and who once cried ‘freak!’ in horror of their likeness, now finds herself, in
a twist of fate the most frightening ‘freak’ of all.

In this same way, Rei Kawakubo has taken the ‘flawless’
form of the white, Western, ideal of the female, hour glass figure, tall and
curvaceous, and using her expert craftsmanship (metaphorically) skinned it
alive and given its mutilated remains to her young, white girl models to wear
down the catwalk. By ‘freaking’ this Western silhouette, through turning
desirable curves into grotesque tumours(5 and 6), which in turn, renders her perfect white girl models grotesque
by association, the designer seems to simultaneously mock, both the stereotype
of “shapeless” Japanese clothes draped over ‘small’,
‘petite’, East Asian bodies and the seemingly natural, neutral space of white womanhood.[20]

4. Still from ‘Freaks’, directed by Tod Browning (1932: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

7 and 8, Stills from Mean Girls directed by Mark Waters (2004: Paramount): Cady robs Regina of her “hot” body, in the still below Regina is horrified that she can longer fit into her ‘dream’ dress.

This is revenge as
redistribution of power, drawing a parallel to Lindsay Lohan’s character Cady, in
the 2004 teen comedy ‘Mean Girls’, who in an attempt to dethrone ‘the fascist
dictator’ Regina
George, the cruel queen bee of her high school, steals her

“hot” body (7) by
tricking her into “unknowingly eating 4000 calories a day”.Castrated of her white girl physique, she is left humiliated, alienated and
powerless, too bloated for her pale pink dream dress (8), she bulges uncomfortably out
of maroon sweat pants (a playful parallel to the Comme models’ unsightly dress
protrusions) and is now mocked by those who once feared her. Barbara Kruger
once proclaimed that “your body is a battleground” and, in this case, it seems
victory is declared by destroying the opposing territory.

The question of the
unwanted transformation, identified in both ‘Freaks’ and ‘Mean Girls’, returns
us to the ero-guro film ‘Horrors of
Malformed Men’, and specifically how these forms of representation intersect
with the lived experience of disability in Japan (an important factor to
consider in the contextualisation of this particular Comme collection). The
question of disability is evident from the title in Japanese alone, ‘Kyoufu
Kikei Ningen’, which roughly translates to “those filthy invalids.”[21] The Japanese culture critics Patrick Macias
and Tomohiro Machiyama explain this stating:

“Simply put, you cannot
call someone, or something, “Kyoufu Kikei Ningen” anymore. The
English translation “Horrors of Malformed Men” sounds a bit too polite. In
Japanese the words strongly imply that the deformed are inhuman, but also that
one should be afraid of them.”[22]

Regarded as a homage to Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’ the
film is regarded (partly as a result of the aformentioned title) as “unfit for
mass consumption in its home country” due to its treatment of themes of
disability.[23]
It follows the story of a young man escaping from an institution for the
mentally ill and eventually discovering that his long lost father (played by
Hijikata) is a warped, web fingered villain (9) who is the “ugly bridegroom” “to
the most beautiful woman in all of China, Japan and India”. When he is betrayed
by this beautiful, able bodied wife, he retreats to an island, which he intends
to transform into a utopia for the ‘malformed’. Here he kidnaps older people
and babies and (without

consent) surgically alters them so they may join his ‘malformed’ ranks. His wife is kept captive in the meantime, a parallel to ‘Freaks’ own tale of husbandly revenge.

9. Director Ishii’s use of distorted reflections emphasizes Hijikata’s character’s physical, and therefore, morally, ‘warped’ state in this still from ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ (Toei: 1969).

We can see this story as a lurid parallel to Rei’s own
‘freakified’ models. Consider this ‘malformed’ background extra (10. 11), who
also featured in the original promotional trailers (12). Note the figure’s
floor long length dress, bound tight, to reveal an array of peculiar protrusions
in their lumps and back (13). Is it not uncanny in its likeness to Comme des
Garcons’ own ‘lumps and bumps’ collection? Is the silhouette not remarkably
similar? Of course, we cannot be sure if Rei actually watched this film, or even
its trailer, and even if she did, if she was inspired by, or even noticed, this
earlier example of a ‘Quasimodo dress’. (Though, it is certainly a possibility,
given the equally avant-garde circles she would have moved in at the time of
the film’s release.) Regardless of these ambiguities, to find such a clear
precursor to the Spring/Summer 1997 collection, a precursor, which so perfectly
complements this paper’s goal, of contextualizing the Comme collection within
the existing history of ‘deformity’, is certainly a remarkable discovery.

This returns us to the question of exaggerated
‘deformity’ versus real life disability, as often, the ban on ‘Horrors of
Malformed Men’ has been regarded as a simply by-product of militant “political
correctness.”[24] Similarly
it may seem far-reaching to locate Comme’s fantastical dresses, so dislocated
from reality, in the world of high fashion, within the history of disability in
Japan. However, just because it is unexpected does not make it untrue. For
visual culture does not exist in isolation, and representations of ‘monstrous deformity’
in visual culture live, if not intentionally in support of, but certainly in
conversation with, the ableist attitudes of mid 20th century Japan.

It is important to realize that attitudes in Hijikata
and Kawakubo’s generation were particularly extreme. Condemned to institutions
for life, disabled people were kept segregated from able-bodied society,
conditions were extremely poor, and children were often left unwashed so that
“flies gathered over them and laid eggs in their bed sores”.[25]
Women were involuntarily given hysterectomies, sexual abuse of patients was
widespread, and a eugenics lens was applied to the lives of disabled people,
with the law going so far as to question if it was truly murder if a mother
killed her disabled child.[26]
The Fuchu Ryoiku Centre, which opened in 1968 serves as a particularly powerful
example of the mistreatment of disabled bodies. This is outlined in the 2001
paper ‘The Disability Rights Movement in Japan’, which explains:

“For disabled persons to
be accepted into the Centre, their parents had to sign a waiver eliminating the
requirement of their consent for any surgical procedures performed on their
adult children. This enabled the doctors of the Centre to perform any surgery,
including lobotomy and autopsy, without parent notification. As a result,
residents were used as guinea-pigs by the doctors for medical research.”[27]

Perhaps, now we can understand why Hijikata’s premise
that “only when, despite having a normal, healthy body you come to wish that
you were disabled or had been born disabled, do you take your first step in
butoh” falls into the problematic territory of ‘occupying the Other’.[28]
A point illustrated by critics reflecting on the dancer’s “spastic” butoh performance
in ‘Tales of Malformed Men’, an observation which was not without grounding. For
Hijikata did indeed study the movements of people with polio, people who in an ableist
society, may indeed be perceived as “spastic”, in order to mimic their gestures
in his choreography.[29]

At this point it is
significant to consider how the seemingly subversive work of the creative
avant-garde fits in with the existing power structures of able-bodied culture.
In a New Yorker article, Rei Kawakubo once argued that she “likes tradition and
history” but also “wants to break the rules”, what better compromise than a
freak show, in its confirmation of existing power structures through its
exhibition of those that, by mere dint of their existence, radically defy it.[30]

This complements the “sometimes shunned but at times
made special” position that disabled people occupy in Japanese culture.[31]
The idea of disability as a mouthpiece for the ‘unique’ creativity of the able
bodied, found in the Quasimodo dresses of Comme des Garcons and Hijikata’s
polio inspired dance moves, is revealing in its irony. For the mission of institutions
was to make disabled bodies conform as much as possible to ableist ideals, with
children pressured into walking, even if it was physically too difficult for
them to do so.[32] Whilst,
outside of the institution, many disabled people underwent the “high
psychological price” of “passing” as able bodied in everyday life to avoid
being discriminated against and mistreated in so called ‘mainstream’ society.[33]

In contrast to these lived experiences, Rei Kawakubo
and Hijikata appear to offer disability to their audience as a form of
liberation, challenging pre-existing notions of beauty and elegance for an
alternative model of being. This is the idea that an able bodied person’s
occupation of a vague notion of difference through ‘deformity’ provides them
with a seemingly ‘radical’ sense of agency.[34]
The notion, of ‘deformity’ as a subversive and empowering tool in the hands of
the able bodied creative, is another revealingly ironic point, when considering
how little control disabled people actually had of their own bodies in
institutions such as The Fuchu Ryoiku Centre, with its consent free use of
invasive, experimental, surgery. For much as
‘Horrors of Malformed Men’s leading man is stabbed in an institution by one of
“the crazies”, only to be pleasantly surprised that the weapon was merely a
novelty retractable knife, the tumours in the Spring/Summer 1997 collection are
removable, giving the wearer the option of taking them in and out at will, an
option that, needless to say, the disabled person does not have.

This disability as freedom model, where textile
crafted tumours may double up as angels’ wings, is particularly evident in the
genre of ‘dancing deformity’, which connects Butoh with Comme. Whilst Hijikata’s
requirements for a successful butoh dancer was “to see the world from the
perspective of disability so badly she wished she were born that way”[35]
Rei Kawakubo adapted the growth-like forms of her lumps and bumps collection
for the medium of dance, taking them to the stage as costumes for Merce

Cunnigham’s, ‘Scenario’, 1997. Despite being clothed in Otherness, these works, with their bold green gingham style prints and wide blue stripes (14), are neither dark nor threatening, a far cry from the sinister, stormy setting of one of ‘Freaks’ more ‘frightening’ scenes. The same can be said of the original Comme des Garcons collection, with its use of primary colours and simple prints (3). These clothes are not horror film scary. Instead they seem to represent, a joyful, childlike freedom, for the able bodied adult.

14. Jacque Maotti, “Merce Cunnigham’s ‘Scenario’”, 1997, New York

Though, this in theory may seem positive, or at least
more palatable than Hijikata’s work, it is important to realize that this
portrait of the happy Other is not necessarily working against ableist culture.
For the disabled adult is taught by society to be “childlike, loveable, always
smiling” in order to be accepted, or at least tolerated by the able bodied
community.[36] For
the joyful Other, that appeals to the able bodied person, and may even be romanticized
by them, is simply another system of control to keep disabled people in a
position of inferiority. I think of the words of the British feminist author Caitlin Moran: “I
am, by and large, boundlessly positive. I have all the joyful ebullience of a
retard.”[37]
Whilst, Rei Kawakubo’s landmark collection certainly possesses more complexity,
more subtleties, than such a crude remark, it is in the same school of thought,
if one is to view a hunchback dress as an able bodied person’s key to liberation.

The subject of dance and ‘deformity’ brings us back to
Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’, in one of its most famous scenes: The Wedding Feast,
where Cleopatra (prior to her duck lady transformation) celebrates her wedding
to Hans, a circus performer with dwarfism, music plays and Minnie Woolsey
(known for her stage name Koo Koo the Bird Girl) dances on the table. This is
not about Minnie’s striking performance, but the question of who may dine at,
who may dance at, the ‘freaks’ table. A powerful example of this is found in
Susan Sontag’s essay ‘America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly’. Here Sontag
criticises the photographer of ‘freaks’ Diane Arbus, who she believes, is
fetishizing Otherness from a position of privilege. Sontag argues:

“Arbus’s work
is reactive—reactive against gentility, against what is approved. It was her
way of saying fuck Vogue, fuck fashion, fuck what’s pretty, the twin poles of
boringness and freakishness.”[38]

To a certain extent, the same could
be said of the Comme des Garcons collection, with its juxtaposition of girl
next door, suburban banality, found in the kitchen table check prints of its
dresses, contrasts to the jarring ‘freakishness’ of the garments tumorous
bulges, a freakification of domesticity it shares with both Horrors of
Malformed Men (15) and much of Japanese post-war literature.[39]
But perhaps these subjects are not a binary, with prettiness at one end and
freakishness at the other. For, beauty, particularly in the fashion industry,
with its warped distance from reality, is in so many ways, an acceptable form
of ‘deformity’, begging the questions of whether such themes are as reactive as
they appear on the surface. Susan Sontag, identifies this ‘beauty as deformity
model’, saying:

“Who could have
better appreciated the truth of freaks than someone like Arbus, who was by
profession a fashion photographer—a fabricator of the cosmetic lie that masks
the intractable inequalities of birth and class and physical appearance.”[40]

Perhaps, the bandages on the ‘malformed’ lumps and
bumps-esque extra (i13) were not a result of a medical procedure, but a
cosmetic one. After all they were a movie star, if only for a brief second.
This reading complements the interpretation that the circus world of Tod
Browning’s ‘Freaks’ is a metaphor for Hollywood. Mark A. Vieira,
whose academic work specialises in the history of cinema, explains this,
writing:

“The
circus itself appears as a distorted symbol of the Hollywood studio, creating
vast profits for its owners by displaying its employees — whether actors or
"monsters" — in garish popular entertainments…The movie shows the
folly of trusting the kind of beautiful surface — "glamour"- — that was MGM’s particular
trademark by having that surface disfigured and destroyed by the "low
elements" represented by the freaks.”[41]

The film critic Peter Bradshaw continues this idea
viewing ‘Freaks’ “as a provocative comparison with the
alienated condition of women and the freakish nature of all showbiz celebrity.”[42]
If glamour is freakishness, then Cleopatra was a freak already, Rei’s models too. The
transformation was simply a gentle reminder to the audience. It is certainly a
plausible explanation that is not without grounding in the context of these
cultural works. But surely we can go further. For this as ‘ugly on the outside
as they are ugly’ inside model still feels too reductive, too closely tied to
an idea of an ugly-pretty binary where disabled bodies may act as canvases for
the abled bodied artist’s elaborate metaphors.

I find atonement, not in the original Comme
collection, but instead in its recreations online. Time
Magazine was quick to deride the selfie, shared online as an object of
narcissism (16). But what is interesting is the discarded selfie, blinking,
mouth open, the ones instantly put in the recycle bin; the images that expose
rather than conceal, but in that exposure form armour to keep the author safe.
I see such images as the meeting of medical photo and model test shoot. And I
see one of the most powerful examples in the work of fashion blogger Arabelle
Sicardi, a queer Taiwanese-American writer, whose $15 dollar recreation of a
‘lumps and bumps’ dress (17), made as a teenager, and shared with her blog followers,
navigates these tensions so expertly. She has blacked her own eyes out, confronting
Jeffrey Eugenides’ medical photography model as “the black box; a fig leaf in
reverse, concealing identity while leaving shame exposed.”[43] For, in Arabelle’s
writing on chronic illness, queerness and mixed identity, all against a
backdrop of Comme des Garcons, we find that ideal self and actual self is not
the quintessential rock and a hard place.[44] But instead that these
tensions between model, mannequin and mortal body can be creatively explored in
a model of thought that does not exploit those marginalised by ableism, but
instead provides the critical tools so that this very community may speak more
boldly.

[26]
For more information see the 1970 case of a 2-year-old disabled child being
killed by their mother in Kanagawa prefecture, where following petitions by
parents the district attorney reconsidered their prosecution.

4 comments:

Question-- do you know who owns the rights to these runway images of the CdG SS '97 collection? I'm trying to figure out how I go about obtaining permissions of copyright and use for a publishing project. Thanks so much!